1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus or the like which autonomously moves along a target path.
2. Description of the Related Art
As robots have become more sophisticated in functionality, there are increasing opportunities for the robots to perform jobs or works such as carrying luggage or guiding human beings to their destinations, and the need for the robots to move while preventing contact with the human beings is increasing. In this relation, a technique to decrease the traveling speed of a robot based on a result of determination that the obstacle is a human being has been proposed (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2006-79325). Further, a technique to cause a robot to move along a path having a shortest moving distance to a target point among a plurality of paths for preventing contact with an obstacle has been proposed (see Proc. 2000 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2000) “RRT-Connect: An Efficient Approach to Single-Query Path Planning”).
When the traveling speed of the robot is decreased, however, the human beings around the robot may feel uncomfortable about the behavioral change of the robot. Thus, it is difficult for the robot to move while cooperating with the human beings surrounding it.
Further, it is unclear for the human beings how the robot sets its target path and, hence, how the robot will change its direction. There may be a case where, when the human being expects that the robot will shift its position to his/her right and thus moves to the left, the robot also moves to its right. This may rather increase the possibility that the human being and the robot come to contact with each other due to the behavioral change of the human being based on the false prediction. Thus, it is difficult for the robot to move while cooperating with the human beings surrounding it.